It took me a while to change my mind, even having spoken to Graham Doke, the man behind the Anamaya meditation app. Doke is a London-based therapist and meditation expert, who in a former life was a lawyer and an investment banker. Consequently, he knows a good deal about stress and anxiety.

"When you're anxious, the amygdala fires and shuts off cognitive and memory functions. There are a lot of people operating in the City with impaired cognitive function," he says wryly. "But if you're happy, you're not frightened, and if you're not frightened, your cognitive function isn't impaired." Happiness is not something that can be achieved with a new house, or job, or partner, he says. "It's something to be pursued for itself, and it's accessed through meditation very efficiently." So who am I to argue? I download the Anamaya app, which has a nice photograph of mackerel clouds at sunset and pleasant tinkly music, and get going. There are more than 350 meditations on the app, covering 11 different focus areas, including worry, anxiety, stress, pain, sports and pregnancy. I click on anxiety and begin.

The first thing I notice about the app is that it takes into account the realities of city life. With mindfulness training, we started off by meditating for 45 minutes daily – something of a struggle, to put it mildly. These meditations, by contrast, hover around a much more user-friendly 10 minutes, which creeps up imperceptibly in subsequent sessions.

At first, of course, I forget to meditate at all, and frequently have to switch on the app in bed, which means all too often I'm asleep before the temple bells tell me it's all over. After a few days, I decide to set my alarm early and meditate first thing. Strangely, although I love my sleep, I find the 10 minutes I spend sitting bolt upright listening to Doke's soothing tones and counting my breaths while my husband snores beside me is a better way to start the day than being jerked from slumber by the Today programme. After just a week, I begin to miss my meditation session if I forget it, and try to catch up by closing my eyes on the Tube. As well as the app's realistic approach to modern concentration levels, there are other aspects I like: such as the reminders I receive hourly to pay mindful attention to what's going on around me; and the fact that if you meditate regularly, your practice sustains the growth of an on-screen cartoon plant, which gets larger and more healthy-looking with every session – very pleasing to one who in real life can barely keep an African violet going.

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I've now worked my way through the whole of anxiety, and have started on worry, but already I feel there is less for me to worry about. Not that the meditation makes me irrepressibly joyous, just that problems remain in perspective. The road of life is still bumpy, but there is more air in my tyres.

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